Don Surber: Guillotine climate change skeptics?

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If the world is warming, it is doing so at one-quarter of the rate the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicted in its 2007 report.

The IPCC admits in a yet-to-be released report that it overestimated global warming, the London Daily Mail reported.

“But the new report says the observed warming over the more recent 15 years to 2012 was just 0.05C per decade -- below almost all computer predictions,” the newspaper reported.

That is a change of five-thousandths of a degree annually.

Feel the burn.

The weather is doing what Leona Woods Marshall Libby forecast 30 years ago.

She’s a big deal. At 23, she was the only female on physicist Enrico Fermi’s team that built the first nuclear reactor and first atom bomb.

Dr. Libby later developed the method used to measure temperatures centuries ago using tree ring data, which is a key tool in climatology.

In 1979 -- when the scientific consensus was global cooling -- Dr. Libby forecast a rise in temperatures until the year 2000 when it would get colder again for the next 50 years.

“Easily one to two degrees,” she told the Los Angeles Times. “And maybe even three or four degrees. It takes only 10 degrees to bring on an Ice Age.”

The first half of her prediction proved true. Temperatures peaked in 1998.

But why bother with the facts? Global warming is politics, not science. The head of the IPCC is an economist. Its Nobel is a Peace Prize.

Yes, horticulturists use water vapor and carbon dioxide in their greenhouses.

But that is to feed their plants. Carbon dioxide is your friend, not a pollutant.

As the evidence mounts that this is junk science, its promoters are getting ugly.

Two years ago, Professor Richard Parncutt of Graz University in Austria called for the execution of skeptics.

He later retracted his statement, but pardon people for being nervous. Austria was part of Nazi Germany.

And history shows that being right is small comfort.

In the 18th century, the scientific consensus backed the theory of phlogiston, which held that there were three elements.

Along came Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier who determined this was wrong.

People now consider Lavoisier as the Father of Modern Chemistry, because he did the math and used experimentation to prove his point.

But some people held on to the phlogiston theory for a while longer. They did so because everyone else had said it is true. And if you do not believe what everyone else believes, then you are an idiot.

Hans Christian Andersen mocked this conformity in his story, “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” in which con men sold the emperor cloth that didn’t exist. They told him the cloth was invisible to the hopelessly stupid and people who are unfit for their office.

Not wishing to be known as a fool or unfit, the emperor pretended to see the cloth.

He put on the non-existent clothing and paraded naked before the people, who were silent lest they be considered fools.

Finally, a child blurted out that the emperor was wearing nothing. That broke the spell.

And so it goes with global warming. If you do not believe then you are a denier, anti-science, and a tool for that great bogeyman, Big Oil.

The truth is every flood, every drought, every tornado, every hurricane, every cyclone, every dip in the polar vortex, every derecho, every wildfire, every blizzard and every other weather phenomenon does not prove global warming.

Forces that are beyond man’s comprehension control and deterimine the weather.

Skeptics beware, they guillotined Lavoisier.

His execution was unrelated to his debunking phlogiston, but his status as the father of chemistry did not spare him.

Legend has it that when he pleaded for a stay of execution so he could complete one final experiment, the judge replied: “La République n’a pas besoin de savants ni de chimistes; le cours de la justice ne peut être suspendu.”